Hi all,

As the current 1.5 beta 2a version seems to be reasonably stable I decided to start work on the 1.6 version. I have a number of personal targets for this version, namely:

"must have's":

• More scripting (macro's, model generation through script etc)
  
• Allow hot key customization (this is also needed for my macro/script extension plans)
  
• Region selection (2d/3d rectangle/circle)
  
• Part bin group management / creation.
  
• MSAA LDraw rendering (this actually already works, so I might include it in the definite 1.5 version too).
  

• POVRay animation export.
  
• Blender animation export.
  

Lego star wars lightsaber of kylo ren is beautifully light up by Liteupblock

This is a bit of an odd request so bear with me.

I'm working on starting a business that would rely heavily on LDraw/MLCad. As such, I'd like to discuss some payed opportunities for part authors. Most emails here on the forums are hidden and the lack of a private message system is the reason I'm reaching out in this way.

If you are interested in finding out more about it please email me: tclites[at]gmail[dot]com

Thanks for taking time to indulge my odd request.
Tyler

The LDraw.org Steering Committee is pleased to announce that the 2015 James Jessiman Memorial Award (JJMA) recipient is Roland Melkert.

Just as last year programmers prevailed over part-authors as recipient for the JJMA, but the fact that there was no discussion who to pick from the candidates once Roland's name was on the table, shows how much he deserves our recognition. Roland discovered - he used the word "stumbled on" - LDraw somewhere in 2000/2001. The oldtimers among us will remember his first program LDModeler where you could animate a minifig by pulling up and down some sliders long before someone tried to get some life into a minifig by complicated POVRay scripts or Blender animation. Roland's second "exercise" LD4DStudio an LDraw animator with fast real-time preview is still online. The term "exercise" is by no means meant to be diminishing. By Roland's own admission the LDraw programs we all benefit from are subject for some programming experiments. Roland, who is a self employed software engineer from the Netherlands, uses LDraw every time he needs to learn something new. In the case of LD4DStudio it was OpenGL; luckily around 2010 he decided to dive into multi platform development which lead to LDCad, the most powerful and complete LDraw editor so far. Let's hope there are many more things to learn - for our benefit ;-) - for the this year's James Jessiman Memorial Award recipient: Roland Melkert!

More information on the JJMA can be found at: http://www.ldraw.org/article/222.html

Willy Tschager
On behalf of the LDraw.org Steering Committee

Hi all. I found way how to extract mesh from Lego Star Wars. I have this *.obj file, but i have questions. Is there any way to convert it to dat format, and find right scale. If we find solution, we can extract a lot of meshes( mostly minifigs and creatures) and convert them to ldraw( than clean up ,add conditional lines and edges)

Attached Files

  JABBA_PC.zip (Size: 25.83 KB / Downloads: 7)

I'm new to LeoCAD, and today I have rendered a few minifigures but never saved them. I wish to go back and edit them but I can't because LeoCAD can't open .3ds files. Is there a way I can convert them back to:

• .lcd
  
• .ldr
  
• .dat or
  
• .mpd
  

Hello everyone,

First off, I wasn't exactly sure in which subforum to post this, so I just placed it in general. I hope that's no problem.

Anyway, as the title already says, I wanted to talk about a website for the LDraw OMR sets. I'm the 'indexer'/'maintainer' of the huge list of user-submitted LDraw models at EuroBricks. I also was the one that started submitting LDraw files from EuroBricks onto Brickset. Due to reasons (which I won't include here now) the Brickset uploading stopped a while ago (for now at least).

And in between all of that and more, is the 'LDraw OMR'. A specification that a lot of people like, but the repository itself doesn't really exist. That's been bothering me since I started using LDraw years ago: everyone keeps talking about this 'Offical Model Repository', but it's nowhere to be found (easily at least). I'd like to change that. I was thinking about a little website which collects all those OMR files and makes it easy for the user to search for the file they'd like to download.

In fact, this morning I already made a prototype website. A little while ago I started experimenting with Python and a web-framework called Django (in my little experience, it's an amazing framework btw) and I saw this as a great oppurtunity to experiment and learn some more.

Well, prototype, it's actually already a fully working website which is just missing a bunch of features and content (and isn't hosted anywhere). As I said before, it's made in python using a framework called Django and it uses a sqllite database. It's fully functional; it has an admin-interface to add files and sets to the database. The only major feature that's missing is a search and listing of all available files. But those things are very easy to add. I just haven't done it yet.

You can view some images of what I have so far, here.

So, I was wondering what you guys think about this? Is this a good idea? Would it be better to be a standalone website or a subdomain at ldraw.org? Also, I have completely 0 experience with hosting anything, let alone a python application... Anyone who has more experience with that?

And, lastly: if this text is kind of vague or has no structure at all: I'm sorry, my writing skills were always very bad :|

Have a nice day!

There are some new features build in now and also (as always) bugfixes and changes.

New
1) Command line option /r changed to ui less version for scanning of files only and write the report to a file in "<userdocuments>\MPDCenter""
2) Command line option /c (correct) in conjunction with /r will correct the file and write it to "<userdocuments>\MPDCenter\corrected".
3) Command line option /l (library) works with both options on the library with report and correction (library will not be touched). (auf Recifier postprocessor achten-erl.)
3) If a conditional line and a line have the same values, the conditional line will be deleted.
Changes
1) Message for wrong comment lines changed.
2) Message for not corrected triangle because of colinear vertices changed.
3) If you "Save as" then the new name is written to the "Name:"-tag of the new file.
4) the application has now a new icon
5) There is no test for flat files scaled in the flat direction.
Bugfix
1) Correct colinear quad sometimes bring wrong lines.
2) Check on file name ending ...s01 or ..p01 could generate an error.
3) using of rectifier postprocessing gave wrong messages.
4) parsing of the author line improved.
5) If a subfile could not be found the boundingbox is set to all zero.
6) If the entire file will be flushed, also the picture will be flushed and the new header

You can download the tool as always from http://ldraw.heidemann.org/index.php?page=datheader

Hello all,

I've finally managed to finish beta 2.

It mainly fixes some minor and some potential very annoying things.

It also introduces some minor new features, namely:

(sub)model duplication.
New path part skin options (to better emulate LSynth behavior if wanted).
Part bin search tweaks (you can now search for e.g. 2x4 and it will find "2 x 4", "2 x 4", "3 x 2 x 4" etc).
New/updated snap info (mostly done by Philo, thanks to him for that).

If no major problems are found / reported based on this version I'm hoping to do a final 1.5 version in a couple of weeks.


As always the latest version can be found here:
http://www.melkert.net/LDCad/download

the page
http://www.ldraw.org/parts/latest-parts.html
shows the error message